Sports

SIMMONS: Players may have been too tired to whoop it up, but not Ujiri

The words came out of Masai Ujiri’s mouth in the hallway just outside the Raptors dressing room, loudly and proudly and with a sense of basketball satisfaction.

“Where’s that f---ing monkey?” he said, wide smile across his face. Then he repeated it a second time, his own personal piece of professional profanity — not the kind that has gotten him fined in the past — because this was his moment, his team’s moment, the moment for his coaches and his beleaguered stars. A basketball night for a city still somewhat foreign to basketball, and a weekend unlike any before it in this city that invented sporting disappointment.

The Leafs won Saturday night. The Blue Jays won Sunday afternoon. The Raptors won their first best-of-seven playoff series in the NBA. It only took 21 years and so much heartache and heartbreak to get to this place. But what a place it seemed to be late on a Sunday night.

The expletive monkey is gone. The Raptors are anew. It’s on to the second round. And still so difficult to decipher, explain, make sense of.

“I just think it’s great for the city and great for the players and great for everybody and the coach and everybody,” said Ujiri, the accidental architect of this team. “It’s a huge monkey off our back, right? On to the next, but this was something everybody thought about everywhere. Everybody talked about it and we got through it. It doesn’t matter how ugly it was — and it was ugly at the end. It’s the next step now. We needed that.

“Somebody said it , it was going to be tough,” Ujiri went on. “It’s always tough in the playoffs. I don’t think we lost our composure, but I just think it was that thing everybody was thinking about. It’s off now. It’s over. You could tell. Everybody was feeling: ‘Are we losing this one again?’ And we got through it. We fought through it. It’s on to the next now (Miami Heat).

“I’m proud of everybody, everybody, coaches, players, our fans have been unbelievable. To stick with us, wow. Like I said, nothing is done. It’s on to the next. This is something — everybody knows — we needed.

“It’s why I’m talking to you. If not, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

Strangely, the excitement outside the Raptors dressing room, in the hallways, inside and outside the directors lounge was ebullient, excited, dancing without music.

“It was absolutely spectacular,” said Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, who has been around Toronto basketball so long that he put in for the expansion franchise when John Bitove was granted it 22 years ago.

“Listen, it doesn’t get much better than this. It’s unbelievably satisfying to be able to come out and get this monkey off our backs. We did it. We got it. That’s what matters right now. Now it’s on to the next round.”

The next round has been a place for other teams in other cities. The Raptors have been to the next round once before and that’s all. That was so long ago that most of these Raptors were kids back then.

The Raptors got to this point through seven games and a hold-your-breath 89-84 win with an up-and-down DeMar DeRozan a clearly hurt Kyle Lowry and the Raptors, in the end, relying on eight players, including the rookie Norman Powell, to win the series over Indiana in a long seven games.

Inside the Raptors locker room, there was no screaming, no hooting, no hollering, maybe because the team was either exhausted or numb, or maybe this is the way the new breed of athlete celebrates.

DeRozan was sitting close to Lowry, and both of them had their heads down, staring at their cell phones. Patrick Patterson sat quietly at his locker, looking down, beside James Johnson at his locker, almost silent. There was barely a sound to be heard: If there had been any dancing or celebration, there seemed almost no sound of it.

“That locker room is full of fighters and scrappers and guys that are really getting into it now,” coach Dwane Casey said of his exhausted team. They had almost nothing left at the end of seven games. But enough to carry on.

“More than anything, we got the monkey off our back,” said DeRozan, and everybody spoke of this mythical monkey. “We were just going to leave it all out there, whatever we had. It was great. The energy.”

They felt it at the end, at an Air Canada Centre all dressed up in red and celebrating maybe like it had never celebrated before. “It’s tough to get that moment duplicated,” said DeRozan, trying to take it all in. “You just want to live in the moment.”